


Bent Corners

by amaresu



Category: Push (2009)
Genre: Gen, Pre-Series, Vignette
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-08
Updated: 2014-01-08
Packaged: 2018-01-07 23:34:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 726
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1125699
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amaresu/pseuds/amaresu
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>All she's gotta do is find the lady.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bent Corners

**Author's Note:**

  * For [APgeeksout](https://archiveofourown.org/users/APgeeksout/gifts).



> So this was supposed to be a post-series fic about Cassie playing poker to work on her Watcher skills.

She starts because she's bored. The hotel is hot and stuffy and smelly and she hasn't had a vision about Nick or where her mother wants her to go in weeks. Instead she's sitting in New York waiting, knowing that if she was even half as good as her mother she'd already know where to go. The girls who work the hotel give her pitying looks and try to buy her dinner, but looking out the window of her hotel she can see a small time conman running a Find The Lady card scam. It starts as a way to amuse herself, try to see where the Lady is, if she gets three right she gets to go out and buy something from the corner store. 

Not that it's easy to tell if she's right because she can't see the cards from her window, just the angry tourists walking off in a huff. Which is how she ends up in front of the table throwing her five bucks down. She loses, loses again, and loses a half dozen more times before the guy tries to give her back her money, clearly worried about scamming a kid. She smiles up at him and says, truthfully, “I've got the money. Scratch winners are easy, this is hard.”

He lifts his hands up and starts moving the cards. She's sure that in his mind he did his due diligence in not taking money from children. They go through another fifty dollars in fives, losing all the way except for one sweet and glorious victory that she's half sure was just the laws of probability going her way for once. She buys a pop at the corner store and gives the guy selling flowers down the block another $50 to buy the scratch tickets she specifies. They split the winnings 50-50.

The next day Sniffers catch up to her, tracing her down the street by flowers from the guy who buys the scratchers. She sees them coming and slips out the back of the hotel, newly forged passport in her purse and the feel of Asia in her head. She can't quite get there with her money, but England is a step along the way. The trick to staying ahead of Sniffers is never having anything new. Used clothes, used money, hotel rooms that pay by the hour. It's why they like toothbrushes so much, people will share underwear before they'll share toothbrushes.

In London she sets up shop at another hooker inn, but hangs out on the stoop across from the local Find The Lady man. She watches for a day before he asks what she's doing, Cockney accent so thick she can barely make it out. She grins and says as brightly as she can, playing up the twelve-going-on-thirteen thing, “Practicing my psychic powers by guessing where the Lady is.”

He smiles at her grin and she can see him get suckered in, he gets her to stand up front of the table and they spend the next hour practicing. By the end she's got a twenty-five percent success rate and the knowledge that she needs to get to Hong Kong. It doesn't take much to convince the man to buy some scratchers off the store down the street, after which he really does believe in her psychic powers.

She spends a week in London before the local boys try to get her to work for them. There's a lot of money to be made with a true blue psychic. She's got her go-bag and is half way to the tube station when they bust down her door though; it's hard to take a psychic that doesn't want to go and they have no idea how to go about it. She goes to Paris next, Berlin after that, Dubai, Singapore, and then finally Hong Kong. A week here, a week there, a meandering path across two continents staying one or two steps ahead of Division, and a new Find The Lady at every turn. By the time she gets to Hong Kong she knows which apartment is Nick's, when to go, and to bring a toothbrush. 

She's feeling pretty good about the short term future. Too bad it's the long term future she's worried about, the futures cascading faster than she can follow after Nick open's his door.


End file.
